Often the amount of space that is available to display information on a display screen of an electronic device is less than needed to display all of the information at a desired resolution (e.g., font size). As an example, when displaying information on a personal digital assistant or cellular telephone, the small screen size constrains the ability to fully display all of the desired information. Electronic devices with larger display screens, such as laptops and personal computers also suffer from this problem. For example, frequently only a portion (e.g., a window or the like) of the display screen is available for displaying a particular type of data.
Typically, when faced with displaying an item that does not fit within an allocated display region, one or more characters are truncated from the end of item with ellipses shown at the end of the item to indicate that the item has been truncated. Determining which characters to remove is simple with this technique.
However, removing information from the end of the item in this arbitrary manner can result in the item being undecipherable to a user. For example, the end of the item may contain information that the user needs to understand the item. However, determining what characters to remove from the item, while still leaving characters that are useful to understand the item, is a difficult problem.
Thus, a need exists for improved ways of determining how to present an item in a limited region of a display of an electronic device such that the item is readily understandable to a user.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.